What Do the Servants Know? In: Gill, C. (Ed.) Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–1737: from Leviathan to Licensing Act
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Lyons, P. (2010) What do the servants know? In: Gill, C. (ed.) Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–1737: From Leviathan to Licensing Act. Ashgate, Burlington, VT, USA, pp. 11-32. ISBN 9781409400578 Copyright © 2010 Ashgate A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge The content must not be changed in any way or reproduced in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder(s) When referring to this work, full bibliographic details must be given http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/45511/ Deposited on: 28 November 2013 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 1 Chapter 1 1 2 2 3 What Do the Servants Know? 3 4 4 5 Paddy Lyons 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9 10 BETTY. Well, since Fortune has thrown me in this chamber-maid station, I’ll 10 revenge her cruelty and plague her favourites. 11 11 No fool by me shall e’er successful prove, 12 12 My plots shall help the man of sense in love. 13 13 (Mary Pix, The Beau Defeated, 1700)1 14 14 15 To whet the audience’s appetite for displays of wit and ingenuity yet to come, 15 16 Betty the chambermaid takes the stage to herself at the finish of the first act of 16 17 The Beau Defeated. She is knowing, cheerfully and very engagingly knowing. 17 18 Outside the entertainment industry, however, servitude and knowledge were not 18 19 at all aligned in Restoration England. Records show the legal system heard and 19 20 weighed evidence from servants at best with caginess and scruples and with little 20 21 readiness to rely on the observations or understanding of a subaltern class.2 In his 21 22 influential writings on education, the progressive philosopher John Locke gave 22 23 blunt and emphatic warnings, singling out as ‘most dangerous of all’ any exposure 23 24 of a developing child to ‘the examples of the servants’.3 To focus on servants in 24 25 Restoration culture is to encounter a line separating actuality and fiction. 25 26 By departing from social convention and received opinion and, instead, taking 26 27 it for granted that servants are perspicacious, art in this era was to achieve complex 27 28 and subtle effects. Etherege’s play The Man of Mode (1676) – often and quite 28 29 fairly instanced as the generic Restoration Comedy – is illustrative. Witness, for 29 30 example, how the tense, intimate bedroom scene between Dorimant and Bellinda is 30 31 conducted and dramatically enhanced by the presence of Handy, Dorimant’s valet- 31 32 de-chambre.4 The stage directions call for candlelight, and specify that Dorimant 32 33 appear in a state of undress, with Handy ‘tying up linen’, which is to say removing 33 34 and disposing of soiled sheets, from the bed where Dorimant and Bellinda have 34 35 been consummating the success of their plot to humiliate Mrs Loveit, mistress to 35 36 Proof Copy 36 37 37 38 1 Mary Pix, The Beau Defeated, I, 1, pp. 172–3, in Female Playwrights of the 38 39 Restoration, eds Paddy Lyons and Fidelis Morgan (London, 1992). 39 2 40 Paula Humfrey, ‘What Did the Servants Know?’ in Women and History: Voices of 40 41 Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Frith (Toronto, 1995), pp. 75–80. 41 3 42 John Locke, ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’, in The Educational Writings 42 of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge, 1968), p. 187. 43 43 4 George Etherege, The Man of Mode, in The Plays of George Etherege, ed. Michael 44 44 Cordner (Cambridge, 1982), I, 2, pp. 1–71. 12 Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–1737 1 Dorimant and Bellinda’s best friend. Bellinda is on edge and starting to panic, for 1 2 fear Dorimant will subject her to the same disgrace as she helped him engineer for 2 3 Mrs Loveit. Dorimant swears fidelity, but the extravagance with which he makes 3 4 the very promises she hungers for only feeds and augments Bellinda’s anxieties. 4 5 Through the course of their troubled exchanges, Handy comes and goes: he 5 6 arranges transport for Bellinda, he keeps watch on the street lest any unwanted 6 7 visitors enter and interrupt the proceedings, and he helps Bellinda make an exit via 7 8 the back stairs so her departure can pass unobserved. Though he says little, silence 8 9 does not equate with ignorance, and Handy’s competence betokens awareness. 9 10 Indeed, from the very opening moments of the play, Handy has been established 10 11 as privy to his master’s tastes and tendencies: well-versed in Dorimant’s addiction 11 12 to new and novel conquest, he is equipped to recognize Bellinda’s fears as all 12 13 too well-founded. His taciturn presence counterpoints the empty promises and 13 14 vain pleas spilling from the lips of Dorimant and Bellinda, and thereby introduces 14 15 on stage an understanding that what may appear hectic and emotional is in fact 15 16 rather more routine than it takes itself to be. Neither laughing at their folly, nor 16 17 participating in their panic, Handy’s knowingness constitutes an alternative 17 18 dimension, and enlarges the optic on Etherege’s comedy, disturbingly. 18 19 Remarkable here – and throughout the drama and fiction of the Long Restoration 19 20 – is the ease with which it is taken for granted that servants generally can and do 20 21 know. By contrast, in our times a different and a double protocol prevails. Nowadays 21 22 if servants are imagined as knowing, it is on condition that their powers are highly 22 23 exceptional, so much so as put them in command, like Jeeves, the butler in P.G. 23 24 Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster novels. Otherwise – and somewhat surprisingly insofar 24 25 as postmodern culture often considers itself postindustrial and based on a new service 25 26 economy – servants have come to be imagined as objects of knowledge rather than as 26 27 themselves subjects who can be presumed to know. Even a fiercely interrogative text 27 28 such as The Tortilla Curtain (1995), T. Coraghessan Boyle’s dark and intensely satiric 28 29 analysis of exploitation and class dependency, exemplifies this current tendency. 29 30 30 31 A maid showed them in. She was small, neat, with an untraceable accent and a 31 32 tight black uniform with a white trim and a little apron Delaney found excessive: 32 who would dress a servant up like somebody’s idea of a servant, like something 33 33 out of a movie? What was the point?5 34 34 35 35 Delaney is Boyle’s most Gulliver-like antihero, and while he continues to puzzle 36 36 over whatProof the maidservant signifies, Boyle’s readersCopy are left in no doubt: she is a 37 37 stage prop, her visibility an element in the apparatus of respectability assembled 38 38 by a ruthless gangster to glamorize his household, and thereby deflect his guests’ 39 39 attention from the fact he is living under house arrest. This present-day servant 40 40 simply signifies, rather than in any way knows. In the larger scheme of the novel, 41 41 her showiness places her in opposition to the oppressed and unfortunate illegal 42 42 migrants from Mexico, Cándido, and América, immigrants on whose servitude 43 43 44 44 5 T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (New York, 1996), p. 186. What Do the Servants Know? 13 1 and labour Delaney and his California neighbours rely, and whose misery and 1 2 presence they sentence to invisibility, carelessly and regardlessly jeopardizing 2 3 their existence and survival. Almost out of sight themselves, Cándido and América 3 4 apprehend the world facing them with piercing sensory vividness, and feel and 4 5 suffer every one of the blows that rain constantly on them with acid persistence; 5 6 but their perceptions never modulate into an understanding, and never amount to 6 7 a knowledge empowering them to grasp or master their situation, not even in a 7 8 matter of life and death: ‘They hit something, something so big it was immovable, 8 9 and Cándido lost his grip on América and the raft at the same time; he was in the 9 10 water suddenly with nothing to hold on to and the water was as cold as death’.6 10 11 Lacking a capacity to process information and make of it knowledge, servants 11 12 most usually appear in postmodern culture as helpless victims, and – as here – as 12 13 spectacles to evoke pathos and pity; to be a servant and otherwise in contemporary 13 14 culture is to be magical, like Mary Poppins. 14 15 Restoration culture mocked magic, as a bag of low tricks. To investigate further 15 16 how the Restoration could imagine servants differently – differently from how 16 17 servants were viewed in Restoration life, and very differently from how servants 17 18 are portrayed in our own times – I shall take three steps. First of all, I shall propose 18 19 a set of four protocols or rules concerning servants in Restoration plays up till 19 20 the end of the seventeenth century. Next I shall outline how radical change to 20 21 what servants are imagined to know becomes manifest around about 1700.